In the wake of the 2011 UK riots and the British government's new American-style 'war on gangs', this book is the definitive account of 'how gangs work'. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gangs and drawing on a variety of sources, How Gangs Work provides a vivid portrayal of gang life, but not as the British traditionally know it.
The book deconstructs the mythology of gangs to make sense of the profiles and motivations of gang members in straightforward, rational terms. How Gangs Work examines the vital processes of evolution, organization, and recruitment within gangs and gang members' instrumental and expressive uses of violence, media, and technology. Special attention is paid to the role of gangs in the drugs trade and the relationship between gangs and organized crime. The book concludes with a critical appraisal of gang desistance and the precarious future of gang prevention and intervention, with practical advice for practitioners, police and policy-makers.

Ashley Baggett uncovers the voices of abused women who utilized the legal system in New Orleans to address their grievances from the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth century. Poring over 26,000 records, Baggett analyzes 421 criminal cases involving intimate partner violence - physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship - revealing a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. Before the Civil War, some challenges and limits to the male privilege of chastisement existed, but the gendered power structure and the veil of privacy for families in the courts largely shielded abusers from criminal prosecution. However, the war upended gender expectations and increased female autonomy, leading to the demand for and brief recognition of women's right to be free from violence. Baggett demonstrates how postbellum decades offered a fleeting opportunity for change before the gender and racial expectations hardened with the rise of Jim Crow. Her findings reveal previously unseen dimensions of women's lives both inside and outside legal marriage and women's attempts to renegotiate power in relationships. Highlighting the lived experiences of these women, Baggett tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and legal rights. Moreover, she demonstrates recognition of women's legal personhood as well as differences between northern and southern states' trajectories in response to intimate partner violence during the nineteenth century.

Literature in the child abuse and child protection arena has tended to adopt either a practice or legal perspective. Drawing on their expertise as researchers and leaders in their field, Julia Davison and Antonia Bifulco offer a comprehensive and cohesive book on child abuse and child protection, drawing on both criminological and psychological perspectives on all forms of child maltreatment and child protection practice together with impacts on the victims. This book considers a range of areas, from definitions of child abuse and discussions of its prevalence, to an examination of the experiences of children in care, to international perspectives on children within the criminal justice system, to the emergence of online child abuse and the increasing awareness of historical abuse. Each chapter draws together key elements in the field, including prevalence and definition, different disciplinary approaches; different practice challenges; international impacts; and technological issues. Brief case studies throughout the book reflect the voice or experience of the child, ensuring that the focus remains on the child at the centre of the abuse. Balancing coverage of theory and research and considering implications for practice and policy, this book will appeal to a range of disciplines, including criminology, psychology, psychiatry, social work and law.

I Am Not Your Victim vividly details the evolution of domestic violence during the 16-year marriage of author Beth Sipe. Encouraged to publish her story by her therapist and co-author, Evelyn J. Hall, Beth relates the background and events leading up to and immediately following the tragic act of desperation that ended the life of her sadistic perpetrator. Beth's subsequent mishandling by the police, the military, a mental health professional, and the welfare system illustrates how women like Beth face further revictimization and neglect by the very systems that should provide support and assistance. Insightful commentaries written by experts in the field follow Beth's story and deepen readers' understanding of the causes and process of spousal abuse, why battered women stay, and the dynamic consequences of domestic violence. This updated edition includes new commentaries and an epilogue that tracks what happened to Beth in the years following the book's publication.

This book has two aims: to clarify the meaning of C. Wright Mills's depiction of the sociological imagination; and to use this to develop a sociological framework that assists in understanding the process by which communal violence has ended in Northern Ireland and South Africa. The contrast between these two societies is a familiar one, but the book is novel by developing an explanatory framework based on Mills's "sociological imagination". This model merges developments in the two countries at the individual, social structural and political arenas in order to account for the emergence of their peace processes.

* Offers context while providing a coherent, applied overview of a wide range of suspect vulnerabilities and how to address them when interviewing * Serves as a practical guide to interviewing vulnerable suspects for both uniform police and detectives. * The only book on interviewing vulnerable suspects that includes the most up-to-date legal considerations and challenges of modern society

This book examines drinking and attitudes to alcohol consumption in late medieval and early modern England, France, and Italy, especially as they related to sexual and violent behaviour and to gender relations. According to widespread beliefs, the consumption of alcohol led to increased sexual activity among both men and women, and it also led to disorderly conduct among women and violent conduct among men. A. Lynn Martin shows how alcohol was a fundamental part of the diets of most people, including women, resulting in daily drinking of large amounts of ale, beer, or wine. This study offers an intimate insight into both the altered states induced by alcohol, and, by opposition, into normal relations in family, community, and society.

This book makes an important contribution to the international understanding of domestic violence and shares the latest knowledge of what causes and sustains domestic violence between intimate partners, as well as the effectiveness of responses in working with adult and child victims, and those who act abusively towards their partners. Drawing upon a wide range of contemporary research from across the globe, it recognises that domestic violence is both universal, but also shaped by local cultures and contexts. Divided into seven parts: * Introduction. * Theoretical perspectives on domestic violence and abuse. * Domestic violence and abuse across the life-course. * Manifestations of domestic violence and abuse. * Responding to domestic violence and abuse. * Researching domestic violence and abuse. * Concluding thoughts. It will be of interest to all academics and students working in social work, allied health, sociology, criminology and gender studies as well as policy professionals looking for new approaches to the subject.

"The editors. . . whose work also appears, have presented us with a valuable resource for years to come."
--"Peace News"

"The strength of "The Women and War Reader" lies in its both interdisciplinary and geographically diverse approach. It confronts the devastating impact of wartime violence and militarized societies on women."
--"Iris"

War affects women in profoundly different ways than men. Women play many roles during wartime: they are "gendered" as mothers, as soldiers, as munitions makers, as caretakers, as sex workers. How is it that womanhood in the context of war may mean, for one woman, tearfully sending her son off to war, and for another, engaging in civil disobedience against the state? Why do we think of war as "men's business" when women are more likely to be killed in war and to become war refugees than men?

The Women and War Reader brings together the work of the foremost scholars on women and war to address questions of ethnicity, citizenship, women's agency, policy making, women and the war complex, peacemaking, and aspects of motherhood. Moving beyond simplistic gender dichotomies, the volume leaves behind outdated arguments about militarist men and pacifist women while still recognizing that there are patterns of difference in men's and women's relationships to war.

The Women and War Reader challenges essentialist, class-based, and ethnocentric analysis. A comprehensive volume covering such regions as the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Iran, Nicaragua, Chiapas, South Africa, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and India, it will provide a much-needed resource. The volume includes the work of over 35 contributors, including Cynthia Enloe, Sara Ruddick, V. Spike Peterson, Betty Reardon, April Carter, Leila J. Rupp, Harriet Hyman Alonso, Francine D'Amico, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Carolyn Nordstrom.

Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia's sense of nationhood was born from-and continues to be defined by-experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians' imagined place in the world. Moving beyond the primacy that is typically accorded white accounts of violence, contributors place particular emphasis on the experiences of those perceived to be on the social periphery, repositioning them at the center of Australia's relationship to global events and debates.

After the multidimensional financial crisis of 2008, the member states of the Eurozone imposed a set of economic policies to save their economies. Socially unpopular cuts contributed to the occurrence of violent movements that both opposed austerity policies and created animosity towards the politicians who implemented them. Combining qualitative and quantitative comparative analyses from anti-austerity movements in 14 Eurozone states from 2007 to 2015, Joanna Rak develops an original typology of patterns of a culture of political violence to explain why some anti-austerity movements turned to violence and others did not, despite having shared goals and political values. She uncovers the very nature of the differences and similarities between cultures of political violence, identifies their sources, and determines their differing results. Simultaneously, she opens a discussion on the exploratory and explanatory utility of the category of a culture of political violence in the Social Sciences. Theorizing Cultures of Political Violence in Times of Austerity casts new light on the scholarly debate on cultures of political violence and anti-austerity violent behavior, making it a compelling read for scholars of political sociology, political behavior, comparative politics, European politics, and sociology.

Juvenile homicide and fatal maltreatment remain serious and pervasive problems in the developed world and especially in the United States, where in 2005 some 1,500 children died from neglect and physical abuse. Alarming statistics such as this, as well as an upsurge in the media attention paid to all things forensic, underscore the pressing need for the utmost rigor in the scientific investigation of child abuse cases. This well timed volume is a response to the climate of public and press interest in such inquiries, where the forensic aspects of the casework generate an enormous amount of attention. The contributions cover a wide range of topics and explore many of the finer details of investigations into juvenile fatalities suspected of being abuse-related. The chapters reflect both the multi-disciplinary nature of such investigations, and also the need for law enforcement professionals to take a rounded, holistic approach to the casework involved. The motivational factors that lead many professionals enter this arena of investigation are, of course, personal and individual. However, at the core of their commitment and their work is a shared need for justice, plain and simple. Victim advocacy and protecting the rights of children, both living and deceased, remains a key impetus for those professionals who specialize in child abuse research. At the heart of this book is the aim of providing both a vital resource for investigators, and a purposeful voice for the young victims of abuse, unable as they are to stand up and speak for themselves.

Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called 'traditional' forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

Surveillance, privacy and public trust form a burgeoning presence within debates surrounding technological developments, particularly in the current 'war on terror' environment. Social, economic and political issues are invoked in collecting, categorizing, scrutinizing and mobilizing information on the everyday activities of the population. These are implicated in new legislative developments, ways of conceptualizing society and a growth in the industry of protest. However, what do we know about the day to day detail of these developments? This book situates these issues in a detailed study of CCTV to offer a timely, robust and incisive contribution to knowledge.

A disturbing look at the suffering of one small orphaned, Irish boy and the abuse he endured between 1939-1948, when the Irish legal system and the church had gone mad with regard to the care of children.

Using the Peruvian internal armed conflict as a case study, this book examines wartime rape and how it reproduces and reinforces existing hierarchies. Jelke Boesten argues that effective responses to sexual violence in wartime are conditional upon profound changes in legal frameworks and practices, institutions, and society at large.

Alarming news reports point to an almost incomprehensible problem of violence in America. Understanding this problem requires timely and accurate information about the magnitude and scope of violence, the effect of violence on our society, and society's perceptions of violence. "Statistical Handbook on Violence in America" is the authoritative source of data gathered from widely scattered sources, both published and unpublished, and assembled in a single volume for accurate and efficient access. Featuring 377 tables and figures, this volume reveals data on victims and offenders, as well as the association of violence with: the home, health care, individual attitudes, the workplace, the economy, and public policy issues.

'A Life Hidden from View' is a candid look at my life through my eyes. I had a somewhat unconventional childhood, living a very secluded, mostly in solitude, life. Going to school wasn't without its dramas. Once the other children found out I was illegitimate, the bullying started. At senior school, circumstances led to me being sexually abused. When I left school, life improved for a while. I grew up into a very independent young woman. Supporting myself and doing really well at work. I do have a somewhat quirky outlook on life and my sense of humour reflects this, as you will see sprinkled throughout the pages. My feelings of isolation, not loneliness, has not stopped me doing what I want to do. I have travelled alone to various holiday destinations and enjoyed them all. I have enjoyed pastimes of dancing and being around horses for most of my adult life. I am currently researching to find my dad. Although I say I am mostly alone, I'm not really. I do tend to attract the supernatural and have seen, and been in the presence of, what some people may call ghosts. I don't quite view them like that. In my later years at work I was bullied, to the extent that I took early retirement to get away from it. Being bullied, abused and neglected for most of my life has resulted in me having long-lasting health issues. I want my book to be a help guide to any of my readers who may find themselves in similar situations. It is important that you tell someone, get the help you need and deal with it, so you can move on with your life. I hope my book helps.

This workbook offers a comprehensive review of existing violence prevention programs, which can help schools evaluate their existing programs and select the right approach for them. Author Dr. Jared M. Scherz offers practical guidance on building a prevention paradigm that integrates into the existing mission and vision of a given school. Scherz breaks down this paradigm into measurable areas including parent involvement, the use of technology, and the role of social media in violence prevention. The main thrust of this book is the creation of an Early Warning Violence Detection and Prevention System (EWDPS), based on the Potential for Violence Inventory (PVI) outlined in the book. The EWDPS and PVI are the basis for upcoming software that will become the future of violence prevention on this country.